Also, another possible solution I thought of to use data files from Dropbox in Pythonista: you can "open" the data file in Pythonista, use editor.get_path() to get its full path, and then hardcode that into your script. As far as I can tell, once Pythonista has "opened" a file from Dropbox, it is allowed to access it forever, even after you close the editor tab for the file. Of course this is far from optimal, it requires modifying every script to use the full paths, and it only works if the data file has a file extension that Pythonista accepts.

@omz, thanks logging out and back into iCloud on my Mac worked!

@cvp , I understand. But I am still very happy. This will only be a matter of weeks before this stuff is working very well. Just to have the option is such a break through I think. I think the tech is secondary to the will to do it. The tech will get sorted out, the will to open the door has been the biggest issue:)

do report back on your experiments ... reading through the docs, i believe iCloud support had to be enabled in the info.plist for this to work. also it seems perhaps the app must be released in the app store.